Edinburgh Fringe Comedy reviews: Kanan Gill | Pierre Novellie | Andrew Clover

The Tiramisu World Cup, the underlying logic of Haribo Starmix and a random encounter with Mike Tyson provide plenty of food for thought in our latest comedy round-up

Kanan Gill: What Is This? | Pic: Hans Jacobs

Kanan Gill: What Is This?

Pleasance Courtyard (Cabaret Bar) (Venue 33)

★★★★☆

Considering he blithely performs a routine in Hindi, briefly excluding perhaps half his crowd, and that his hour is tent-pegged on three wildly varying anecdotes – ranging from the fairly common experience of trying to find a lost cat; the exclusive, but tedious, bureaucratic nightmare of trying to buy land, and the frankly singular experience of competing in the Tiramisu World Cup – Indian stand-up star Kanan Gill's Fringe debut is a wonderfully relatable slice of existential angst, oozing with class and a much richer mix of ingredients than his clumsy efforts at making the famed Italian dessert.

Gill is 34 and has achieved great success as a comic and actor in his homeland and internationally. Smoothly groomed, he's perfectly at ease at a microphone. But in matters of love, status and ambition, he's a roiling internal mess of worries and doubt, an acute student of the human condition with himself as his ongoing test subject. Self-deprecating with elan, he's simultaneously arrogant enough to project his anxieties and failings onto humanity as a whole, while being wittily persuasive enough to convince you that he's right. I defy anyone to present a more thorough, accurate and amusingly cynical definition of what it is to be stuck in your “comfort zone” in your thirties.

At the same time, he's a masterful storyteller. The cat tale is, ironically, a bit of shaggy dog story, resplendent with irony and delightful details. The land purchase is initially a more cerebral exercise in exposing the hoops we create for ourselves to jump through in order to make abstract concepts such as ownership, trustworthiness and self a concrete reality. But the closing, tiramisu saga is just straightforwardly hilarious. A pathos-soaked account of how a bored idiot and his friend misguidedly strove to inject meaning into their lives halfway across the world, it's a delicious confection of exceptional hubris.

Jay Richardson

until 25 August

Pierre Novellie: Must We? | Pic: Matt Stronge

Pierre Novellie: Must We?

Monkey Barrel Comedy (Monkey Barrel 3) (Venue 515)

★★★★☆

He may decry the fact that even a job as ostensibly varied and exciting as stand-up comedian invariably becomes routine, but Pierre Novellie's near-metronomic consistency since he debuted at the Fringe a decade ago is a pleasure to behold. Furrowed of brow, gently lugubrious and with his imposing, rather stiff, heavy-set stature, he's always been a strikingly impressive observational act, bringing an informed historical perspective, intellectually robust reasoning and an erudite turn of phrase to his peevish exasperation and bafflement with life. Sure, he can appreciate the whimsical idiosyncrasy of a packet of a Haribo Starmix, disparate sweets seemingly thrown together with the random abandon of a madman. Yet probing a little deeper, he establishes the Teutonic logic in the child's confectionery and reveals its basic, but critical, reward-based role in his artistic endeavours.

Since receiving his autism diagnosis in 2022, Novellie is less a man simply standing apart from, and often bewildered by, the mass of society, but now one doing so with a greater understanding of neurodiverse and neurotypical behaviour, a bit more personal skin in the game. Contrary to expectations perhaps, he's become a more fully rounded act, increasingly introducing personal material about his relationship to logic, his neurotypical girlfriend and the clash of mindsets they endure.

From the faiths of primitive cults to the insidious mechanics of online algorithms, Coco Chanel's Nazi past to the 6'3”, 18-stone comic's body issues and frustration at buying clothes, Novellie's hour comes at you like a leisurely flick through an entertaining but tightly edited Sunday supplement, with a pithily arch comment piece on the raison d'être of Russell Brand's career. Ultimately, he despairs at the tyranny of logic, afflicting even the most eccentric. And, in one case he highlights, driving one unfortunate soul to take extreme measures, as he urges everyone to get out of their heads every once in a while.

Jay Richardson

until 25 August

Andrew Clover: A Wild Call

Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose (Venue 24)

★★★★☆

There is no acceptable reason for this show finding its way into the Comedy section of the brochure. It results in Clover's audience shifting uneasily in their seats for the first five minutes waiting for jokes that never come. Luckily, what does come is an hour of alchemically wonderful storytelling. No one tells a story quite like Andrew Clover. So many of the ingredients of this year's narrative magic potion sound 'icky' in today's world of meta performance and TikTok slickness. There is a fair helping of mime, a dead dog, hugging, heartbreak and humming. There is audience participation and more over-sharing than I am normally happy with. But something happens in this extraordinary hour. It draws you in, it wraps you round and it makes you happy. There grows here, something that is the kind of genuine relationship between the entertainer and the entertained that is rarely achieved.

From being suddenly divorced via magical thinking, falling in love again and being dumped again, through a desire to visit the Lost City and the Jaguar Forest of Columbia, to sailing the Atlantic and planting 2500 fruit trees, Andrew holds his audience in a wordspell which takes us to an almost childlike place where emotions are allowed to be very pure, very honest. And that feels joyful. Andrew just wants someone to tell him he is a good boy. He introduces us to many of the people he meets along the way from Fionnuala, Paula on the night watch, Mike Tyson, and Oscar who owned the nursery, to hundreds of tree-happy Dominican children. Andrew did get to see Minka and the Lost City, survived a near death experience and all in all, has done more than most to turn the snakes green again. I think he is a good boy.

Kate Copstick

until 11 August